This invention relates to woodworking bench planes and auxiliary fences utilized with such planes.
Bench planes and other planes are well known for use in woodworking. Generally, a plane blade is positioned in a plane body protruding through a sole that bears against a workpiece during plane use so that the blade will remove a shaving. Fences that bear against a face of the workpiece adjacent to the face being worked by the plane are also known. Such fences are virtually always used with some planes, and in other instances use of the fence is optional. Generally, bench planes are not supplied with fences, although it is frequently desired that a planed surface be oriented at a particular angle relative to an adjacent workpiece face. For instance, it is normally desirable that the edge of a board be formed at a right angle to one or both adjacent faces of the board. In practice, this is often accomplished through a trial and error process using a square to determine whether the board edge is xe2x80x9csquarexe2x80x9d to an adjacent face. Auxiliary fences for jointer planes and other bench planes are known. For instance, the Stanley 386 fence was manufactured and sold during the first half of the twentieth century and was the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 1,057,582.
This invention is a bench plane jointer fence usually having a one-piece fence body that may be secured to the side of any conventional bench plane, preferably by rare earth magnets mounted in the fence body and by the cooperation between a fence registration surface that bears against the sole of the plane and a repositionable stop screw that bears against the top edge of the plane body side. The fence body is preferably fabricated of extruded aluminum so that an upper portion of the fence body lies against the plane side and a lower portion of the fence body is offset from the upper portion to position a workpiece registration surface parallel to the plane side but sufficiently inboard to be under the plane blade.
The rare earth magnets are positioned in steel magnet cups that concentrate their magnetic attraction on the face of the fence that abuts the plane side.
The stop screw is locatable in different positions to accommodate different lengths of planes and to enable use of the fence on either side of a bench plane. An auxiliary fence surface having a wedge-shaped cross section can be attached to the fence body in order to use it to form workpieces edges at non-square angles to an adjacent workpiece reference surface.
In an alternative embodiment, the workpiece registration surface can be adapted to pivot and lock in different angular positions relative to the portion of the fence attached to the plane. This permits adjustment to form workpiece edges at non-square angles to an adjacent workpiece reference surface without use of a wedge-shaped auxiliary fence member.